Journey - SQORUS Onboarding

CSRD Reporting: How Data Addresses the CSR Challenges of a Major Banking Group

SQORUS helped a major international banking group structure its environmental data to meet the requirements of the CSRD, using a Power BI reporting solution designed for environmental management.

 

The challenge

CSRD Compliance Hampered by Fragmented Data

How can a regulatory requirement be turned into a tool for environmental management? That is the central question the CSRD poses to large companies.

In the field, the teams face several obstacles:

 

  • Data scattered across multiple internal systems and sources
  • Diverse sources that are difficult to consolidate into a common repository
  • Indicators that are complex to calculate and report reliably
  • Final reports are often incomplete, prepared manually, and difficult to audit

Background & objectives

A Major International Banking Group Facing the Requirements of the CSRD

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On January 5, 2023, the European Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive ( CSRD ) took effect. It updates and modernizes the rules governing the environmental and social information that companies must provide in order to assess the sustainability of their operations.

These new rules will provide investors and various stakeholders with the information they need to assess a company’s environmental impact and, among other things, to take into account the financial risks or opportunities associated with global warming.

Companies that comply with the CSRD must adhere to the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS ). These standards are based on European regulations and also contribute to international standards. They help ensure greater transparency among companies.

Within a major international banking group, compliance with CSRD standards is one of the company’s key priorities in order to reduce its carbon footprint. To help the group achieve these goals, a data team is working on a reporting tool designed to meet these indicator requirements.

This project focuses exclusively on the environmental aspects of the CSRD.

The SQORUS solution

Power BI Reporting to Centralize Data and Comply with the CSRD

1. Collecte des données énergétiques et immobilières

Through external partners around the world, the group tracks its energy consumption across various categories—including electricity, natural gas, fuel oil, and water—on an international scale. The group also tracks its carbon emissions. This data is then regularly integrated into the group’s information system.

2. Creation of a building database

We have access to a database of buildings containing key information: their names, addresses, floor area in square meters, the various group entities that occupy them, the names of the landlords and tenants under the various leases...

3. Calcul des indicateurs environnementaux

Combining this data makes it possible to calculate various environmental indicators (such as energy consumption relative to the area occupied by the group...) and to identify the sources of various energy consumption and emissions in order to carefully target areas that may consume more energy than others.

4. Restitution dans un dashboard Power BI

These metrics are presented in a Power BI report accessible to stakeholders to guide efforts to reduce the carbon footprint. (such as renovating certain parts of the premises, relocating, reducing consumption of a certain type of energy, switching to an energy source that emits less CO2, etc.).

Technical Architecture

From the data lake to the Power BI dashboard

To ensure the success of this project, here is how our data pipeline is organized:

  • Receipt of energy data and building reference data files into the Cloudera data lake (based on the Hadoop ecosystem).
  • Converting these raw files into Source View (data table).
  • Cleaning, transforming, and processing data based on Source Views to generate new tables of the Usage View type. This is done using Scala code (a data-oriented programming language) with the Spark framework (a distributed data processing engine).

 

Note that functional data modeling is performed in advance to generate Usage Views tailored to the rest of the process.

 

  • These Usage Views are then transferred to a data warehouse SQL Server. The data is modeled using SSAS (SQL Server Analysis Services), and DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) measures are created to meet the latest requirements of the data chain.
  • Finally, this data model is used by a dashboard Power BI that will allow users to view key KPIs visually through charts.

The results

Des indicateurs fiables pour piloter la conformité CSRD

Thanks to this system, business users now have a management tool that allows them to:

 

  • View and retrieve key environmental indicators in real time
  • Identify the energy-intensive sources of consumption
  • Take concrete steps to reduce the group’s carbon footprint
  • Produce reliable reports that comply with the requirements of the CSRD
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Future prospects

Toward a Broader Approach to CSR Management

  • Expansion of the scope to other components of the CSRD: social and governance indicators (ESRS S and G)
  • Increased automation of the pipeline and reduced reporting lead times
  • Setting up automatic alerts for consumption thresholds
  • Exploring Predictive Capabilities to Anticipate Exceedances of Indicators

          The SQORUS Choice

          Why choose SQORUS for your CSRD reporting project?

          Data Expertise & Reporting

          SQORUS manages the entire data value chain, from ingestion to delivery, with recognized expertise in Power BI and complex data architectures.

          Une approche personnalisée

          Every organization has its own data sources and constraints. We build a solution tailored to your context, your systems, and your teams.

          Beyond Compliance

          We help companies turn CSRD compliance into an opportunity for strategic management, performance, and value creation

          SQORUS

          Testimonial

          Amadou-NGOM

          Raphaël LIN

          IT Consultant

          Power BI is more than just visualization: it transforms data into clear, searchable, shareable, and exportable metrics tailored to users’ needs

          Is your environmental data not yet structured for the CSRD?

          From data collection to the visualization of indicators, our consultants support you every step of the way to produce reliable and auditable CSRD reports.

          They trust us

          Discover our other SQORUS case studies

          Who are we?

          Discover the strengths of the SQORUS strategy

          SQORUS is a firm specializing in digital and business transformation for HR, Finance, EPM, and IT functions.

          For more than 35 years, our consultants have been working with large companies on strategic, international projects related to information systems: evolution strategies, decision support, integration, business intelligence, data management, support, and change management, as well as issues related to the cloud and artificial intelligence.

          We have successfully adapted to new digital challenges, the rise of the cloud, and changes in work styles. We have succeeded in forging strong partnerships with the market’s leading software vendors and in attracting business and technical experts.

          Our strength: our more than 350 talented employees, who are dedicated to the success of your projects and share strong values—diversity, commitment, and solidarity—which represent real value for the company and its clients.

          Recognized as a “Great Place to Work” for 12 consecutive years, SQORUS is committed to the well-being of its employees, their career development, and their training in cutting-edge solutions.